Having spent most of my childhood weekends and holidays through the 1970s on Channel on a Birchwood GT33 fitted out by my father, I got bitten by the boating bug from a very early age. On one such holiday I vividly remember chugging along at our normal 12 knots and watching two boats reeling us in then passing us at what seemed an unbelievable speed. That was the first time I saw the beautiful Fairey Huntsman.
A spell in the Royal Navy as a marine engineer during the mid-1980s did nothing to lessen my love of boats but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that I could scrape enough money together to buy my first boat. The brief was quite simple: fast, twin diesel, shaftdrive and good seakeeping. Well, with only £17k it was a very small pond to pick from but I was very pleased to see a Fairey Huntsman 28 in Malta advertised so I booked a flight to view it. The boat had an interesting history, evidently running night-time smuggling trips to Morocco! Unfortunately, however, the price was not negotiable, which it needed to be to allow for the shipping costs back home. Not long after I saw an advert in for another Huntsman in Shamrock Quay, Southampton, and having booked a viewing I found myself standing on the pontoon looking at . I bought the boat on sight despite the worryingly low oil pressure when I ran the engines. However, became mine.
